Multi-Massive Parallel Computing

And here is the first step of my Master’s thesis: studying CUDA. In shortly, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is an GPGPU language and runtime for the new GeForce 8 Series and so on. It’s a complete new paradigm, where programs written for such devices must have a parallel nature. So it isn’t so general purpose as it claims to be ;)

However, this whole paradigm will soon give me some headaches. Just look the figure below:

(Figure taken from Nvidia CUDA: preview)

As you can “clearly” see, host is the CPU side and device is GPU side. A kernel is a program designed to run in parallel. The execution occur on a grid, which is divided into blocks, whose are composed by threads. Blocks and threads run logically in parallel, while a set of threads, called warp, run physically in parallel.

More will come, by the time I learn things ;)